A Customized Comparison-Shopping Agent

Abstract

This paper proposes a framework for building a customized comparison-shopping system in which the users are allowed to add their own shopping stores dynamically. In this framework, a shopping agent is implemented with a robust inductive learning method that automatically constructs wrappers for semi-structured online stores. During learning, strong biases assumed in many existing systems are weakened so that the real stores with reasonably complex document structures can be handled.